Life Is Strange and ‘‘Games Are Made’’: A Philosophical Interpretation of a Multiple-Choice Existential Simulator With Copilot Sartre

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments

On the Concept of Creal: The Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle

The Informational Foundation of the Human Act

This book is the result of a collective research effort performed during many years in both Sweden and Spain. It is the result of attempting to develop a new field of research that could we denominate «human act informatics.» The goal has been to use the technologies of information to the study of the human act in general, including embodied acts and disembodied acts. The book presents a theory of the quantification of the informational value of human acts as order, opposing the living order against entropy. We present acting as a set of decisions and choices aimed to create order and to impose Modernity. Karl Popper’s frequency theory of probability is applied to characterize human acts regarding their degree of freedom and to set up a scale of order in human decisions. The traditional theory of economics and social science characterize the human act as rational, utilitarian and ethical. Our results emphasize that the unique significance of an act lies in its capacity to generate order. An adequate methodology is then presented to defend such hypothesis according to which, the rationality respective irrationality of acting, is in fact only a function of the act’s organizational capacity. From this perspective, it has been necessary to define «order» respective «disorder» as operative concepts that allowed the comparison of the organizational differences generated by each kind of act. According to the presented conclusions, the spontaneity of living, as unconscious thinking, dreaming, loving, etc. and the mainstream of the human acts, are utilitarian, but in an irrational way; they are rooted in unconscious drifts and therefore must be considered irrational-utility acts

Supersymmetry and Polytopes

We make an imaginative comparison between the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model and the 24-cell polytope in four dimensions, the Octacube.Comment: Presented to the Workshop on Geometry and Physics: Supersymmetry. Bilbao, Spain. May 200

Gene Regulatory Networks controlling Arabidopsis Root Stem Cells

Conferencia sobre aproximaciones sistémicas al conocimiento biológicoGene Regulatory Networks controlling Arabidopsis Root Stem Cells Identifying the transcription factors (TFs) and associated regulatory processes involved in stem cell regulation is key for understanding the initiation and growth of tissues and organs. Although many TFs have been described in the Arabidopsis root stem cells, a comprehensive view of the transcriptional signature of the stem cells is lacking. We used a systems biology approach to predict interactions among the genes involved in stem cell identity and maintenance. We first transcriptionally profiled four stem cell populations and developed a gene regulatory network (GRN) inference algorithm, GENIST, which combines spatial and temporal transcriptomic datasets to identify important TFs and infer gene-to-gene interactions. Our approach resulted in a map of gene interactions that orchestrates the transcriptional regulation of stem cells. In addition to linking known stem cell factors, our resulting GRNs predicted additional TFs involved in stem cell identity and maintenance. We mathematically modeled and experimentally validated some of our predicted transcription factors, which confirmed the robustness of our algorithm and our resulting networks. Our approach resulted in the finding of a factor, PERIANTHIA (PAN), which may play an important role in stem cell maintenance and QC function. We then developed an imaging system to perform in vivo, long-term imaging experiments that will be used to understand the dynamics of the regulatory interactions between PAN and its downstream TFs in a cell-specific manner. For this, we designed and 3-D printed a Multi-sample Arabidopsis Growth and Imaging Chamber (MAGIC) that provides near-physiological imaging conditions and allows high-throughput time-course imaging experiments in the ZEISS Lightsheet Z.1. We showed MAGIC’s imaging capabilities by following cell divisions, as an indicator of plant growth and development, over prolonged time periods, and demonstrated that plants imaged with our chamber undergo cell divisions for >16 times longer than those with the glass capillary system supplied by the ZEISS Z1. Future in vivo observations of the expression of PAN and its predicted downstream factors will be key to refine our model predictions and obtain information about the dynamics of the regulatory processes. Our systems biology approach illustrates the strength of integrating computational and technological tools into the experimental approaches to solve key biological questions. We anticipate that our algorithm and our approach can be applied to solve similar problems in a diverse number of systems, which can result in unsupervised predictions of gene functions and gene candidates.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A sufficient condition for strong FF-regularity

Let $(R,\mathfrak{m},K)$ be an $F$-finite Noetherian local ring which has a canonical ideal $I \subsetneq R$. We prove that if $R$ is $S_2$ and $H^{d-1}_{\mathfrak{m}}(R/I)$ is a simple $R\{F\}$-module, then $R$ is a strongly $F$-regular ring. In particular, under these assumptions, $R$ is a Cohen-Macaulay normal domain.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Societ